The incredible amount of data available publicly on the internet for any industry can be useful for market research. You can use this data in machine learning/big data to train your model with tens of thousands of entries.
Here, in this article, I’m going to discuss the development of a web scraper with Node.js, Cheerio.js, and send back-end data to Vue.js in the front-end. Along with that, I’m going to use a simple crawler Node.js package.
If you are in the world of software development, you must be aware of Node.js. From Amazon to LinkedIn, a plethora of major websites use Node.js. Powered by JavaScript, Node.js can run on a server, and a majority of devs use it for enterprise applications. As they consider it a very respectable language due to the power it provides them to work with. And if you follow Node.js best practices, you can increase your application performance on a vast scale.
When it comes to automation testing, it requires a very systematic approach to automate test cases and set them up for seamless execution of any application. This requires us to follow a set of defined best practices for better results. To help you do that, we will let you in on the best Node.js tips for automation testing.
Everyday design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.
The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!
The post Popular Design News of the Week: March 1, 2021 – March 7, 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
If you are building an application using Node.js, it can get a little overwhelming since there are a variety of databases to choose from and different ways to build APIs. One way to reduce development time and focus on the problem you are trying to solve is to use a Database as a service to store the data. The advantage of this approach is to use a cloud database system without purchasing hardware which can be cost and time-effective.
One such database service is HarperDB Cloud. To build REST APIs rapidly this service allows us to perform all database operations using a single endpoint. It supports a variety of programming languages such as JavaScript, Java, Python, and so on. Some of the features of HarperDB are the following:
In the 2020 COVID pandemic, most enterprises have realized the importance of creating an effective digital presence. While some businesses used digital presence to promote their services and business continuity, other companies used the latest trends to stay ahead among competitors. One of the most popular and widely used platforms is Node.JS, which is widely used for the development process.
What is Node.JS?
First, we need a Kubernetes cluster. You may use an existing one or set up a new one. For this tutorial, we chose to use GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine).
Just follow the quick start to create a cluster. To save your money, the default pool with only one node is sufficient for our testing. For node image type, use the default Container-Optimized OS; for machine type, please select one with at least 8G mem. After creating the cluster, go ahead to configure kubectl to connect to the cluster following this guide.
Interference is a simple java framework that enables you to run a distributed database service within your java application, using a JPA-like interface and annotations.
The basic unit of the interference service is a node — in fact, it is a java application, inside which a service instance is running.
In a previous post, I showed how to automate a PostgreSQL fault-tolerant cluster with Vagrant and Ansible.
This kind of setup makes our database cluster resilient to server failure and keeps the data available with no need for human interaction. But what about the apps using this database? Are they fault-tolerant too?
In this time of global economic turmoil, it’s more important than it’s ever been that your financial decisions are based on accurate, up-to-date, market information.
In a world where stock price is a key confidence marker, the businesses that attract attention, secure investment, and grow, are the ones that can demonstrate their value in a wider market.
Up to now, displaying accurate market pricing has been prohibitively expensive, needing direct access to a huge dataset, and the code to mine it. So we’re delighted to introduce marketstack, a real-time market data API that’s reliable, simple to integrate with your site or app, is lightning fast, and includes a free-forever plan.
marketstack is a REST API that allows you to access stock data for public companies at 72 global exchanges including the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and the London Stock Exchange.
marketstack delivers real-time market data, accurate to a single minute, ensuring that the information you base your decisions on, and the information you pass on to your customers, is always up to date.
There are more than 125,000 stock tickers, from over 50 different countries; you can query stocks, or over 75 different market indices; intraday market data is included, meaning you can monitor trades that close at the end of the day; you can even retrieve data about time-zones and international currencies.
marketstack uses cutting-edge technology to deliver market data in an easy-to-integrate JSON format, which is lightweight and incredibly easy to dig into.
Requests are made via a simple HTTP GET call, and all requests are run through bank-quality 256-bit HTTPS encryption. Whatever code stack you’re using, whether it’s PHP, Python, Node, or plain old JavaScript, marketstack provides comprehensive documentation to get your team up to speed in mere minutes.
The highly reliable cloud infrastructure can handle anything from a few dozen requests per year, all the way up to millions of requests per day. Regardless of the scale of your project, marketstack is robust and flexible enough to handle it.
marketstack isn’t just about the bulls and bears of markets, in the tech sector specifically, stock price is an indicator of wider business trends and performance.
When Apple became the first US company to reach a $2 trillion valuation, not only was its stock price central to the story, but it indicated a trend in the tech giant’s dominance that went beyond cold hard cash.
When an eccentric billionaire makes outrageous, and ill-judged comments, and tanks his company’s valuation, the fluctuations in stock price are a big part of the story.
Beyond the spin of politicians, the market index of different exchanges is an indication of what analysts with in-depth knowledge really think during an election campaign.
With over 30 years of historical data, marketstack is a history of business, particularly the burgeoning tech sector, and makes that history available with a simple to use API.
marketstack’s API is built on top of apilayer technology, one of the most respected, and trusted API providers in the world, with a huge amount of experience delivering data reliably. Millions of API requests can be run through the API hourly, and it still has almost 100% uptime.
Any API is only as good as the data it supplies, and marketstack’s data is supplied by numerous high-authority providers around the globe, resulting in unprecedented accuracy.
As a result, marketstack is trusted by over 30,000 companies — including Microsoft, Amazon, Uber, and Credit Suisse — and 80+ universities.
marketstack is entirely free for up to 1000 requests per month, with access to 1 year of historical data, as well as end-of-day data. No credit card is required to get started, and you’ll never be billed. This is the perfect option for simple integrations, or developers working on proof-of-concept builds. What we really like about marketstack is that the free package is genuinely usable. It’s not just a trial version that presses you into upgrading.
For anyone who needs more comprehensive data, packages that include market indices, technical support, and commercial use permissions, start at $9.99 per month, or just $7.99 per month when billed annually.
Head over the marketstack today to claim your free API key, and get started.
[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of marketstack –]
Google resembles an iceberg: there’s the part above the water we can see and use everyday; there’s also the part beneath the water, that we don’t see and know little about.
While many of us are concerned about the aspects of Google we don’t see — the parts that threaten our privacy, or monopolize the web — there’s no denying that Google offers some amazing products and tools, many of them free, all from the convenience of a single login.
Today we’re going to take a look at 12 tools from Google that really do bring something positive to the table.
Polymer is an open-source JavaScript library from Google for building web applications using Web Components. The platform comes with a ton of libraries and tools to help designers and developers unlock the web’s potential by taking advantage of features like HTTP/2, Web Components, and Service Workers.
The main feature of Polymer is Web Components. With Web Components, you can share custom elements to any site, work seamlessly with any browser’s built-in elements, and effectively use frameworks of all kinds. Products like LitElement (a simple base class for creating fast, lightweight web components) and PWA Starter Kit make Polymer easy to use. If you like, you can build your app entirely out of Web Components.
Google Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. The software allows you to audit web pages for performance, SEO, accessibility, and more. You can run Lighthouse using ChromeDevTools, directly from the command line, or as a Node module.
To use Lighthouse in Google Chrome, just go to the URL you want to audit (you can audit any URL on the web), open ChromeDevTools, and click the Audits tab. After you have run the audit, Lighthouse will give you an in-depth report on the web page.
With these reports, you will see which parts of your web page you need to optimize. Each report has a reference doc that explains why that audit is important and also shows you the steps you can take to fix it.
You can also use Lighthouse CL to prevent regression on your sites. Using Lighthouse Viewer, you can view and share reports online. You can also share reports as JSON or GitHub Gists.
Lighthouse also comes with a feature called Stack Packs that allows Lighthouse to detect what platform a site is built on. It also displays specific stack-based recommendations.
Google Analytics is the gold standard of analytics services. Google analytics can be installed on your site for free with a small amount of JavaScript and allows you to see all kinds of details about your site visitors, like what browser they’re using, and where they’re from.
By using Google Analytics you can make decisions about your site based on science, and therefore be somewhat confident that the decisions you make will result in the outcome you are expecting.
Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. The toolkit is open source and free to use. The best part of Flutter is that it works with existing code.
The toolkit has a layered architecture that allows for full customization, which results in fast rendering and flexible designs. It also comes with fully-customizable widgets that allow you to build native interfaces in minutes. With these widgets, you will be able to add platform features such as scrolling, navigation, icons, and fonts to provide a full native performance on both iOS and Android.
Flutter also has a feature called hot reload that allows you to easily build UIs, add new features, and fix bugs faster. You can also compile Flutter code to native ARM machine code using Dart native compilers.
Google has a huge library of APIs that are available to developers but finding these APIs can be difficult. Google API Explorer makes it easy for developers to locate any API. On the Google API Explorer web page, you will see a complete list of the entire API library. You can easily scroll through the list or use the search box to filter through the API list.
The best part of Google API Explorer is that each link to a reference page comes with more details on how to use the API. API Explorer is an excellent way to try out methods in the Monitoring API without having to write any code.
Puppeteer is a project from the Google Chrome team. The platform enables web developers to control a Chrome (or any other Chrome DevTools Protocol based browser) and execute common actions, much like in a real browser. Puppeteer is also a Node library and it provides a high-level API for working with headless Chrome. It is also a useful tool for scraping, testing, and automating web pages.
Here are some things you can do with Puppeteer: generate screenshots and PDFs of pages, UI testing, test Chrome Extensions, automate form submission, generate pre-rendered content, and crawl Single-Page Applications.
Google Developer Codelabs is a handy tool for beginner developers and even advanced developers who want to improve their knowledge. Codelabs provide a guided, tutorial, hands-on coding experience. Codelabs’ site is broken down into several tutorial sessions on different topics.
With the tutorials on Codelabs, you can learn how to build applications from scratch. Some of the tutorial categories include Augmented reality, TensorFlow, Analytics, Virtual Analytics, G Suite, Search, Google Compute Engine, and Google APIs on iOS.
Color Tool makes it easy for web designers to create, share, and apply colors to their UI. It also measures the accessibility level for any color combination before exporting to the palette. The tool comes with 6 user interfaces and offers over 250 colors to choose from.
The tool is also very easy to use. All you need to do is pick a color and apply it to the primary color scheme; switch to the secondary color scheme, and pick another color. You can also switch to Custom to pick your own colors. After you have selected all your colors, use the Accessibility feature to check if all is good before exporting it to your palette.
Workbox is a set of JavaScript libraries and Node modules. The JavaScript libraries make it easy to add offline support to web apps. The Node modules make it easy to cache assets and offer other features to help users build Progressive Web Apps. Some of these features include pre-caching, runtime caching, request routing, background sync, debugging, and greater flexibility than sw-precache and sw-toolbox.
With Workbox, you can add a quick rule that enables you to cache Google fonts, images, JavaScript, and CSS files. Caching these files will make your web page to run faster and also consume less storage. You can also pre-cache your files in your web app using their CLI, Node module, or webpack plugin.
PageSpeed Insights is a handy tool from Google Developers that analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions on how to make the page faster. It gives reports on the performance of a web page on both desktop and mobile devices. At the top of the report, PageSpeed Insights provides a score that summarizes the page’s performance.
AMP pages load faster and also look better than standard HTML pages on mobile devices. AMP on Google allows you to enhance your AMP pages across Google. It is a web component framework that allows you to create user-first websites, ads, emails, and stories. One benefit of AMP is that it allows your web pages to load almost instantly across all devices and platforms hence improving the user’s experience.
When creating websites, it is important that developers test them for responsive design – this is where Window Resizer comes in. Window Resizer is a Chrome extension that resizes the browser window so that you can test your responsive design on different screen resolutions. The common screen sizes offered are desktop, laptop, and mobile, but you can also add custom screen sizes.
Featured image via Unsplash.
